How to make a GIF in After Effects

If you’ve been living in a cave for the last 10 years, you may have missed how GIF files have been crushing it for a while. GIFs are super awesome for a variety of strategic tasks, including messaging, posting on Dribbble, Slack, sharing with clients and team members, lots of places.

The problem is that there’s no good way to get a GIF out of After Effects.

Well, put another way, the only way that is AMAZING will cost you $29.99. But you can try it for free. I don’t get any money from them, it is simply the best tool for the job.

GifGun is distributed by aescripts + plugins and is literally plug-and-play but I show you the settings anyway, and how to download it and install it, and where to find it in your plugins panel.

Let me know what you think. I’m always leery of promoting more stuff that you have to pay for, but in this case I scoured the internet, tried every possible workflow, and this was by far the best.

Looking back, I wasted so many hours not using this plugin it breaks my heart. Don’t make the mistake I did.

Personal story: I was working on a project that required like 30 GIFs. In the past, my preferred (super crappy) workflow meant exporting the video from AE, importing the video into Photoshop, then using their super complicated and tedious (and slow) tool to compress it as a GIF. Average time per GIF: 20 minutes plus. That would have taken me 10 hours. Now, I click the button in AE and my GIF is exported in about 4 seconds. And it looks great! And the file size is small.